The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia

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In this groundbreaking work, social anthropologist David Sneath aggressively dispels the myths surrounding the history of steppe societies and proposes a new understanding of the nature and formation of the state. Since the colonial era, representations of Inner Asia have been dominated by images of fierce nomads organized into clans and tribes-but as Sneath reveals, these representations have no sound basis in historical fact. Rather, they are the product of nineteenth-century evolutionist social theory, which saw kinship as the organizing principle in a nonstate society.

Sneath argues that aristocratic power and statelike processes of administration were the true organizers of life on the steppe. Rethinking the traditional dichotomy between state and nonstate societies, Sneath conceives of a "headless state" in which a configuration of statelike power was formed by the horizontal relations among power holders and was reproduced with or without an overarching ruler or central "head." In other words, almost all of the operations of state power existed at the local level, virtually independent of central bureaucratic authority.

Sneath's research gives rise to an alternative picture of steppe life in which aristocrats determined the size, scale, and degree of centralization of political power. His history of the region shows no clear distinction between a highly centralized, stratified "state" society and an egalitarian, kin-based "tribal" society. Drawing on his extensive anthropological fieldwork in the region, Sneath persuasively challenges the legitimacy of the tribal model, which continues to distort scholarship on the history of Inner Asia.

The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia Review

I bought this book because as a historian I am interested in the cultural changes nomadic pastoralists effect when they conquer or move into sedentary areas. What do they bring with them that is and is not adaptable.

This book, to my mind, spends far too much time criticizing modern social anthropological theory, and it does not do it that well. For instance, the author points out that Khazanov and others question the existence of the conical clan because they have not come across them and that other academics such as Krader and Barfield offer no proof of its existence among nomadic pastoralists in Central and Inner Asia. This not only ignores Leach's work, recently applied to the formation of the state by Maisels, but also disregards, for example, the adopted geneaology of the tenth century Oguz, to mention but one nomadic pastoral polity in Central Asia.

In other words, by concentrating on anthropological theory and case studies instead of the historical record, the author does his argument a disservice. The only historical evidence he puts forward is for the Mongols of the seventeenth century. There is much more available concerning the tore (customary law) in Turkic history and it refers to earlier times.

To sum up, whether or not Turkic or Mongol clan structures ever were conical, there is plenty of historical evidence that nomadic pastoralists had a strong concept of statehood but did not need to apply it by establishing empires unless absolutlely necessary, something for instance both Khazanov and Barfield argue at least in part. In historiography nomadic pastoralists are denied anything more than tribalism by academics who think only things sedentary and Judea-Chritian are civilized and all else is inferior if not barbaric. This is far more corrosive than bad social anthropology, which historians in general disregard because so recent.

I think Sneath has missed a superb chance of setting the historical record straight by tilting at social anthropological windmills instead of taking Western historiography to task.

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